You know what - I have always - and still do have trouble between "objective" and "subjective".
"Subjective" is basically when whatever is being described is influenced by our based on feelings, opinions, tastes, etc. "Objective" is when whatever is being described is not based on those things, but instead based on something (generally something independently observable/confirmable) that does not change according to feelings, opinions, tastes, etc. A basic example of something subjective would be the taste of food -- for some people, 'fancy' French food is the greatest cuisine in the world, while for others it's disgusting and overhyped. There is no objective criteria by which a particular cuisine can be shown to be 'better' or 'worse' than another. An example of something objective would be the Pythagorean Theorem, which is used to describe the relationship between the three sides of a right triangle. The theorem works the same regardless of where you are in the world, how you feel about triangles, whether or not you care for math as a subject, etc.
I understand and believe that there is an objective reality (absolute truth) - I just am never satisfied I am understanding it correctly.
In fact - my whole studylife and drive for growth assumes that my grasp on the "objective" (absolute truth) is incomplete.
Sure, but maybe it would help to remember that
everyone's understanding is incomplete --
"for now we see through a glass, darkly", as St. Paul reminded the Corinthians. Nobody has a complete picture of everything, and nobody's going to. And this isn't just a religious or specifically Christian idea, either. In the secular sciences, the idea of having a complete picture is always shifting because we don't necessarily know what we don't know. The idea of having "completed" science doesn't even really make sense.
I guess I would have always said I am male and I also feel like something inside is a "man". So I guess I'd describe myself as having a gender identity - but I guess some people think there is no gender identity?? You are either male or female and there is nothing on the "inside" that is manly or womanly. So you are only your biology?? Which means once you lose your body, you're not a man anymore??? I had always assumed even after I lost my body I'd still know I'm a "man" because something in me has the "spiritual frequency" (I made that term up haha) of masculine / male / manly ??
Maybe? Now you're describing how it feels for you (your
subjective experience!
), so sure...if that's how you conceive of things, then who is anyone to tell you otherwise?
I don't think the most common objection to trans that you find here on CF is that the people who identify that way are describing their
subjective experiences or feelings
incorrectly (that wouldn't even make sense, once you know what 'subjective' means), but rather that subjective feelings or experiences don't determine objective reality (i.e., whether you 'feel' this way or that, you actually 'are' whatever it is you are, as determined by your biology). I may be unknowingly misrepresenting that, though, so I would welcome correction from any of the people here who regularly post about this issue (as I don't, and when I do post about it, I try to focus on theology and anthropology more than biology).
I would have thought that there is something happening within a person that they know they are manly or womanly - perhaps a spiritual person might find that easier to believe???
I'd like to think I'm a spiritual person, but I don't ever really know what people mean when they say that they 'feel' like a man or a woman. I've found that when I've asked people what that means, there's generally a lot of talk about how they don't fit gender stereotypes, which is fine, but I don't see what that has to do with feelings. As I've written before concerning this issue, my physical body tells me that I am a man, and I don't spontaneously grow a pair of ovaries whenever I cook something or do anything else that would be defined by some as 'feminine' (i.e., domestic) work. Given this, so far I fail to see how this idea of 'male' and 'female' feelings isn't primarily a language game rooted in some oddly sexist assumptions and stereotypes.
It's not immediately controvercial to me for someone to say they feel something on the inside isn't harmonising with their biology.
I totally agree, at this level. The question is what is or is not appropriate to do to deal with whatever disharmony they may be feeling.
By this point - I'm lost.
I have no idea how stuff works haha
I don't think anyone is really hitting the nail on the head in this subject - not yet.
Haha. Yeah. That's completely fair. It is a complex topic, and I am on the outside looking in. What I meant to say in this part of my post, though (just to hopefully clarify), is that while we are often told that "gender is a spectrum", it seems to me like in reality it is
treated as though it is binary, since these subjective feelings are reported against a backdrop of a kind of
idealized femininity or masculinity -- that's why you get people saying "I feel like a man", or "I feel like a woman", or even "I don't feel like I comfortable fit into either" (i.e., "I'm not 100%
on either side"), but not "My femininity is a 3 out of 10, while my masculinity is 8 out of 10", or something comparable to that. Since I was replying to the comparison between the sensation of pain and the 'feeling' of gender, I wanted to compare it to the kind of scale that doctors actually use to measure a patient's subjective report of pain, which is most definitely not binary (it's not just "I'm in pain" or "I'm not in pain"). I don't think the presence of the 'third option' of being neither really changes gender from being a binary, either, because even if many people may feel like that sometimes, the entire reason why the space "in-between" the two poles of masculine and feminine exists is because there's no more accurate way to measure it. So you're either feeling like a man, or feeling like a woman, or feeling like neither, but even feeling like neither requires that you at least implicitly recognize that the sort of 'target' that you're 'missing', if I can put it that way, is one or the other. Nobody's in the middle by virtue of there actually being some "third gender" between the two, but rather because they don't feel they measure up to either of the two in the ways that they would need to to be able to comfortable say "I am a man", or "I am a woman." If those weren't the two genders that there indisputably are, then it wouldn't make sense to say "I feel like a man" or "I feel like a woman." You have to have those as categories in your mind
first, and having a third 'catch-all' category for everything that doesn't fit the other two doesn't make it isn't own thing any more than repeatedly crashing a plane means that you've invented a new form of airplane travel.
TL; DR: Failing to measure up to something (whether or not that measure is fair or accurate or realistic or whatever; that's a separate conversation), or 'perform' that thing satisfactorily, doesn't mean that you've actually
succeeded, but just in some new way that now everyone needs to recognize and add to their own mental lexicons, especially if what we're talking about is based on
subjective feelings like 'feeling like a man/woman', and you're the one who has decided that you don't fit. I think that's the reason for a lot of the somewhat visceral and sometimes downright nasty backlash against the concept of 'trans' identities among some people: it presupposes that because other people are having subjective thoughts in their own heads about themselves and their experiences, the outside world needs to make them a priority and change the way that it speaks, operates, and believes going forward. This is, to some, a mighty big 'ask', and seems to fly in the face of the earlier apologia for other parts of the LGBTQ community, like the "We just want to be left alone to live our lives" refrain that was often repeated in the debate over gay marriage in the USA in recent years. Being left alone and being made the central players in every major political decision of the last 5-10 years (as some people would no doubt argue that trans people are, though I would point out that it's often because various bills targeting trans-identifying people have been written and approved of in more politically and socially conservative areas of the United States) are not the same thing.
But again, I'm trying to summarize what I think people who aren't me might be thinking, based on what I've seen argued on this messageboard, so I'm likely at least somewhat off on some of this (maybe considerably so). Personally for me, the question of anthropology (i.e., what it means to be a person) is paramount, not whether or not trans people are 'in your face' about it or whatever. Even a person who lives in a way that you could never live yourself is still a person, and deserving of respect and a recognition of their basic human dignity. (I live in very liberal California and I guess I've just been lucky to dodge all the drag shows, elementary school lessons teaching kids that they're all LGBT, or whatever else frequently gets reported here as going on in this country, particularly in 'leftist elite' dens of depravity like my state. Strange, that.)
